Family Ties and Peso Signs: Challenges for Career Counseling in the Philippines

The article's 1st section provides an overview of the historical development of career counseling in the Philippines from an economic‐political perspective. The 2nd section raises current challenges and concerns, highlighting the need for a career counseling model that would address, among other things, Filipinos' valued characteristics of close family ties and desire for economic progress.     

The Double Challenge of Market and Social Incorporation: Progress and Bottlenecks in Latin America

Has the past decade of sustained economic growth and political transformations reversed Latin America's historical failure to secure market and social incorporation? To address this question this article draws on the experiences of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay by distinguishing between short‐term outcomes – which may depend on benign international conditions – and policy changes, which are more important for long‐term performance. It highlights the overall success of both Brazil and Uruguay and shows that the other countries have made more progress in terms of social than market incorporation.     

“He invited me and didn't ask anything in return” Migration and Mobility as Vulnerabilities for Sexual Exploitation among Female Adolescents in Mexico

Although human trafficking is recognized as a major human rights violation, there is limited evidence regarding the vulnerabilities that contribute to female adolescents’ risk of being forced or coerced into the sex trade. Vulnerabilities such as gender‐based violence, economic and social inequalities have been shown to shape the risk of sexual exploitation among adolescents. In‐depth interviews (n=18) with current sex workers who reported being deceived or forced into the sex trade as adolescents (<17 years old) were analysed to explore their experiences of migration and mobility in Mexico. Driven by socio‐economic and vulnerabilities in home communities, adolescents often engaged in internal migration and mobility to other Mexican communities and states. Migration and mobility further predisposed them to social isolation, economic hardship and abuse, which were used as tools to trick them into the sex trade. Policies that support safer migration for adolescents in origin, transit, and destination communities are needed.     

Measuring people's trust

Summary. We measure trust and trustworthiness in British society with a newly designed experiment using real monetary rewards and a sample of the British population. The study also asks the typical survey question that aims to measure trust, showing that it does not predict 'trust' as measured in the experiment. Overall, about 40% of people were willing to trust a stranger in our experiment, and their trust was rewarded half of the time. Analysis of variation in the trust behaviour in our survey suggests that trusting is more likely if people are older, their financial situation is either 'comfortable' or 'difficult' compared with 'doing alright' or 'just getting by', they are a homeowner or they are divorced, separated or never married compared with those who are married or cohabiting. Trustworthiness also is more likely among subjects who are divorced or separated relative to those who are married or cohabiting, and less likely among subjects who perceive their financial situation as 'just getting by' or 'difficult'. We also analyse the effect of attitudes towards risks on trust.     

Avian haemosporidian parasites in an urban forest and their relationship to bird size and abundance

Urbanization has been identified as a threat to biodiversity due to landscape modifications. Studies of parasite ecology in urbanized areas lagged behind those made on macro organisms. Here we studied infection prevalence of haemosporidian parasites in an avian community of an urban forest from Germany, and its relationship with bird abundance and body mass. We used PCR to amplify a fragment of the mtDNA cyt b gene to determine the infection status of birds, and bird point counts to determine bird relative abundances. The avifauna was dominated by two small sized insectivore passerines (Parus major, Cyanistes caeruleus), representing ~40 % of the total bird records. The highest haemosporidian prevalence was recorded for Turdus philomelos (100 %) and for Fringilla coelebs (75 %). Bird abundance and body mass were positively associated with infection status for two haemosporidian genera: Plasmodium and Leucocytozoon. Infection rate was lower in juveniles compared to adult birds. We recorded a total of 7 Plasmodium, 26 Haemoproteus, and 10 Leucocytozoon lineages. Avian malaria (P. relictum) was detected infecting 5 individuals of P. major, the most abundant species in the community. These results, together with those of previous studies at the same site, suggest that potentially any of the genetic haemosporidian lineages detected in this urban forest can be transmitted across native and pet bird species, and to species of conservation concern housed at aviaries.     

Ergonomic work analysis of airbus pilots job in Brazil

This article is the result of a case study of ergonomic work analysis carried out in a Brazilian airline company, focused on the safety of the activity of Airbus pilots from the company's national lines. The study was divided in three parts, each one with different approach. First step is how critical situations such as accidents and incidents are dealt with during flight. Then it comes to discuss about adversities found in the working place, the airbus cockpit, and the development of risk map. Last but not least, the study focused in how the irregular working journey compromises the biological clock of the pilots end may cause social issues.     

Objective Bayesian analysis of counting experiments with correlated sources of background

Searches for faint signals in counting experiments are often encountered in particle physics and astrophysics, as well as in other fields. Many problems can be reduced to the case of a model with independent and Poisson-distributed signal and background. Often several background contributions are present at the same time, possibly correlated. We provide the analytic solution of the statistical inference problem of estimating the signal in the presence of multiple backgrounds, in the framework of objective Bayes statistics. The model can be written in the form of a product of a single Poisson distribution with a multinomial distribution. The first is related to the total number of events, whereas the latter describes the fraction of events coming from each individual source. Correlations among different backgrounds can be included in the inference problem by a suitable choice of the priors.     

The Concept of Modularity in Management Studies: A Literature Review

During the last decade, modularity has attracted the attention of numerous management scholars, and both theoretical and empirical studies on this topic have flourished. However, this broad‐based appeal has generated some controversies and ambiguities on how modularity should be defined, measured and used in managerially meaningful ways. This paper reviews the concept of modularity as a design principle of complex systems in management studies. Applying this criterion, 125 studies were selected and classified, grouped according to their prevalent unit of analysis: products, production systems and organizations. Although all these studies are based on Simon's seminal work on the hierarchical and nearly decomposable nature of complex systems ( Simon, H.A. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106, 467–482), this paper shows that they offer different definitions, measures and applications of the modularity concept. This review reveals the implicit structure of meanings underlying this literature and emphasizes that ambiguity in definitions and measures impedes rigorous empirical studies capable of understanding the relationship between modularity in product, in production and in organization design. Cautions and directions for future research are discussed.     

Spatially varying dynamic coefficient models

In this work we present a flexible class of linear models to treat observations made in discrete time and continuous space, where the regression coefficients vary smoothly in time and space. This kind of model is particularly appealing in situations where the effect of one or more explanatory processes on the response present substantial heterogeneity in both dimensions. We describe how to perform inference for this class of models and also how to perform forecasting in time and interpolation in space, using simulation techniques. The performance of the algorithm to estimate the parameters of the model and to perform prediction in time is investigated with simulated data sets. The proposed methodology is used to model pollution levels in the Northeast of the United States.